The Memory Keeper
by shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod
Summary: Endgame speculative, IW spoilers. First the plane, now Thanos. The only two times Steve died, Bucky wasn't there to stop it. Now, Bucky is left alone with the memories he holds, and others he doesn't know he has as he and Natasha try to pick up the pieces.


_This is my first time writing anything Avengers related in a long time, so apologies if things are just a bit off, but this idea wouldn't let me go. This is partially based off of a theory I saw floating around a while back that the hand holding Peggy's compass in the Endgame trailer wasn't Steve's. While I'm not sure if I believe that or not, the idea stuck around and this story was formed. Plenty of angst ahead, so buckle up! (Though I'm sure it isn't quite on the level we'll be getting from the actual film, who's as nervous for it as I am?)_

 _Purely speculative for Avengers: Endgame, but there are spoilers for Infinity War. I don't actually own any of the characters, wow, shocking._

* * *

There's a sense of depressed celebration in the air. It rolls over the world, bringing with it repressed emotions, repercussions, and relief all at the same time. And a reminder of what had been lost in the first place. Wakanda is not an exception, at least, Bucky thinks; he's not exactly anywhere near where a depressed celebration may be taking place for that very reason.

He's down in one of the pristine medical labs, lights turned down low, sitting in a chair and staring out a large window towards a foggy forest and a panther statue that sits off to the side, guarding the land. It's…peaceful. It's the exact opposite of what's flying through his head at a million miles an hour, but that's why he's here.

That's why he's in the cryo-lab Steve brought him to a few years ago when they first fled to Wakanda after Steve's world fell apart to protect Bucky.

It's fitting that the place he finds silence in now is what gave him the first comforting silence he had felt in years.

He looks back out at the forest, the fog distorting what he knows to be patches of burned trees beyond it from when the ships first touched down. But that was weeks ago, apparently, so maybe the trees have partially recovered. He's not exactly sure. He's never been much in the business of asking questions, and after he got back, he decided to make less of an exception to the rule.

He doesn't remember anything, which is fitting considering what he's been used for during the past seventy years, and he figures that for once maybe not remembering is a blessing rather than a curse. He remembers feeling off and then watching as he fell apart, as if he was outside himself, just watching as Steve watched him, and then nothing.

From the way Strange, the aptly named sorcerer describes it, everyone that vanished when Thanos snapped his fingers was trapped in one of the stones itself. A few people remember their time spent there, but not Bucky, and he's not about to go looking. Then, just like that, he was back, fully formed, lying on the ground where he had disintegrated in the first place. Apparently destroying the gauntlet and the power shared by all the stones and Thanos himself was the key to setting things right.

But setting things right all came at a cost.

By the time he had followed the noises to a small clearing in the forest, Thanos was a crumpled heap on the ground, the gauntlet was a melted puddle, and Stark was standing over it with some piece of fancy alien-looking tech.

Sam emerged from the trees at about the same time as Bucky, looking just as confused, first at the fact that he was back, next at the mess left in the clearing, and last at the fact that their teammates hadn't formed a circle around Thanos, but around something else on the ground still obscured from Bucky's view.

His heavy boots crunched on the leaves as he slowly made his way over, taking a headcount as he did so, not recognizing a few of the faces, and not failing to notice the one that was distinctly absent.

Natasha, ever the spy, turned around first, and with tears in her eyes (Bucky didn't know the Widow could cry), took a few steps away from the circle to put a hand to Bucky's chest to stop him from going further.

Bucky stopped out of sheer surprise and confusion, the gradually increasing crescendo in his heart begging to be proved wrong. "Where is he?" was all he asked, grateful his vocal chords had apparently reformed too.

Natasha dropped her hand, met his eyes, and shook her head the slightest bit she was able. "James, you may not want to-" but he was already sidestepping her to fill in her hole in the circle.

He was still too late.

The eyes that weren't on Steve turned to him, but Steve's own remained closed. His legs were bent beneath him, marks in his armor matching up with dark stains on his dark uniform. He'd also shaved at some point during the past few weeks, a fact Bucky would notice even with the blood marring his face. The right side of his head was coated in red, and if Bucky looked hard enough, he could make out a slight indent.

Wanda was at his side, red magic dancing at her fingers, face screwed in concentration. It was as if no one was even daring to breathe, Bucky included, but she eventually dropped her hands into her lap and opened her eyes. "There's…nothing I can do." Her voice wavered and collapsed as did the falsely hopeful faces of those in the circle.

And that was it.

Bucky hadn't asked for specifics on what had happened, he didn't need that image in his mind to be worked over time and time again. He had enough deaths to play on repeat without adding his imagining of Steve's own to the mix. The circle gradually dispersed back to the city until only the original team was left. When Thor offered to carry Steve back with them, Bucky stopped him with a hand. It wasn't that he wouldn't appreciate it, or that he didn't understand that Steve's team was grieving too, but this was _Steve._

This was the guy he'd been friends with since they were kids. He was the one Bucky picked up after fights, during bouts with the latest disease, in the midst of a battle against Nazis. He was the one who pulled Steve out of the water decades later after almost killing him in the first place.

So no, he wasn't about to let anyone else carry Steve's body back.

He did it as gingerly as he could with the metal arm, and while the dead weight took some getting used to, after a few steps he settled and allowed his mind to go on autopilot. It kept him from thinking about who he was carrying and what it meant.

Shuri directed him to a cryochamber where they could keep Steve until plans were made to get him back home. He helped the nurses clean him up and get everything prepared, and when he stepped back, he wished he could have said Steve looked like he was sleeping.

But he had taken enough lives to know that there was a difference between sleeping and death, and all the evidence was spelled out right on Steve's features.

The nurses had left after that, but Bucky hadn't. He found a chair, pulled it up to the window, and sat down while cracks in his wall formed and the autopilot gradually began to fade away.

He's not sure how long it's been since he's moved, but the forest and its fog has gradually become more obscured due to the absence of sunlight, and a few warm lights have come on overhead in the med bay, giving him just enough light to see by. There's a faint hum of the chamber in the room behind him, and of course, the ever-present noise in his head that keeps getting louder.

Not so loud, however, that he misses the quiet knock on the wall leading into the medical area.

Natasha stands there, looking a bit unsure, not that he could blame her though. He'd expect things to be tense given his history with her and the trauma he's just suffered. But if there's anyone that would understand, it's Natasha, Steve made sure to make that clear. The whole team is to be trusted, that's a given, and while Steve didn't gave any specific details, he had mentioned that Natasha could probably understand what he'd been through on a level unlike most other people.

"Mind if I join you?" She's asking permission, to be in his space, check in on him, be near Steve, or be away from everyone else upstairs, he doesn't quite know. Maybe it's a combination of all those things. He gestures with a few fingers towards the empty chair, not moving his flesh hand from where it's been positioned across his mouth and chin with his elbow on his thigh.

She still waits a moment before she crosses the distance and comes to sit across from him. Bucky doesn't miss the way her eyes flit to the room behind them, find the cryochamber, and go right back to whatever's in front of her.

"Nobody knows how to act," she says eventually, and Bucky's guessing present company is included, "not with everything we've gained and lost. It's a lot to process."

Bucky doesn't need to reply to it, the reply is basically already given between them.

"So…I won't ask how you are so long as you return the favor." When Bucky turns back to her, she's got her eyebrow slightly arched. It's only slight, but Bucky can tell by the way her face is a bit too tight that she's trying too hard. A loss like this can crack even the strongest of masks, his own included, and apparently hers as well.

He moves his hand from his face, and the stiffness in his knuckles is an indicator of apparently how long he's been sitting still. "Steve tell you to check up on me in case anything happened to him?"

Natasha just shrugs. "He didn't have to."

"Unspoken thing?"

"Something like that."

Bucky just nods along. "You guys are close?" It's a bit of a statement and a bit of a question, and he knows she'll see the duality of it. He notices after the fact that he's still using present tense, he's not there yet to start thinking of all his memories of Steve being in the past. Natasha's got to notice, but she doesn't comment on it. Maybe she's not there yet either.

"When you save each other on enough missions you tend to get close." She catches his eye, and after a breath adds another sentence. "He's a good man."

"Too good," Bucky mutters, and toys with the almost nonexistent crevices in the new metal arm with his flesh hand. "Stupid." It's an afterthought of a whisper, and definitely not warranted since he doesn't even know the exact circumstances of how Steve died, and at the moment doesn't want to. But knowing Steve, it was probably some sacrificial move for the betterment of everyone else—which Steve would be perfectly okay with. He did put a plane into the ice to stop New York from exploding, after all.

Natasha shifts in her chair, and there's something like defiance in her eyes when Bucky picks his gaze up from his hands. "Jumping out of a jet into the ocean without a parachute is stupid-"

"No he didn't," Bucky cuts her off before she can continue.

"Oh he did, don't ask why." There's a slight, fond smile on her face as she obviously replays the memory over in his head.

He finds the ghost of a smile tugging upwards on his own lips too as he shakes his head. "Figures he wouldn't tell me, I'd tear him a new one."

"I almost did…" she trails off. "But this, giving himself up so we'd have a shot at Thanos, he knew what it could cost, but also the good it could do if it worked."

Turns out he had guessed correctly, but not that he was at all surprised. "At least his sense of self-sacrifice in the face of the greater good survived seventy years in the ice." The smile is still there. From bullies to Nazis to planes to aliens, Steve Rogers didn't back down from a fight and doing what was right. And Bucky was normally right there at his side. Figures the only two times Steve died he wouldn't be there.

And it hits him like a sack of bricks.

"I wasn't there when he took the plane down," he whispers, as if Natasha didn't know that, "I wasn't there today either."

Natasha understands, of course she does, and she immediately shifts to be perched on the edge of her chair so their knees are almost touching.

"Look at me, Barnes," she says, the edge of seriousness in her voice clearly conveying that what she's about to say is not to be trifled with, and he obliges. "Those are choices Steve made that nobody, _nobody,_ present company included, could have gotten him to back down on. He wouldn't want you blaming yourself in any capacity, you know that."

Bucky finds he wishes he could tell Natasha the same sentiment, since both members of the 'present company' have got to be feeling some level of guilt. But he can't quite get the words out.

And he knows Natasha's right about what Steve would want, but that doesn't make anything better. It doesn't fill the hole that's opened up inside his chest. He'd just started getting back around to himself. They'd been able to share memories that no one else knew of, and few people left in the world even remembered the time period in which they were from.

They were each other's memory keepers, and now their roles were switched. Before, Steve had shouldered it by himself. He had been the lone man out of time, catching up in a world that had moved on. Now, Bucky's left with the memories no one else will understand, and thousands more still hidden under the surface that he may never get back.

"Even she couldn't get him to go back on what he knew was right."

In his period of zoning out, Bucky realizes that Natasha had pulled out something from her pocket, and was offering it to him. It only takes a split second for him to recognize Steve's compass, a bit more worn than he remembered, but moving all the same, the clipping of Peggy Carter stuck into it.

"How did you…?" He takes it almost reverently, holding it as gently as he can in his gloved flesh hand, the metal case slightly warm against his skin.

"He's been looking at it a lot recently, with everything going on, kept it close by. I thought you'd probably know what would be best to do with it."

Bucky keeps it in his hand, watching the dials settle as his hand stops moving, and realizes that at the moment, he doesn't know what would be best. But maybe he'll figure it out.

"If you ever want to talk…memories, stories…I'll be here, same goes for the rest of the team."

He tilts his hand ever so slightly and watches as the compass spins and then he gently clicks it shut. "Thank you." His voice is gravely, but the appreciation is honest, and she knows it. "If you want to…same thing," he offers back, though he's not sure how much help he could actually be.

Natasha smiles in her own show of gratitude, and is about to make a move to stand up before she stops herself, tired and sad smile not falling quite yet from her features. "There is one thing."

Bucky inclines his head in a motion for her to continue.

"Years ago he called Stark out for cursing. It became our little team inside joke," she begins, and already Bucky is shaking his head.

"You do know how soldiers talk, right?"

"Hence why I'm asking," Natasha spreads her hands in front of her, a bit amused, and then settles back into her chair as Bucky opens his mouth to explain a world war two soldier's vocabulary, what he remembers at least, to her, and how Steve was not excluded from using the colorful language. It did, however, take him longer to catch on since his mother never liked hearing such words, but after so many stressful close calls, it did eventually work its way into Steve's vernacular when the cameras weren't rolling.

The talking happens faster than Bucky had anticipated, but something in his chest eases at hearing some of what Steve and the team had been doing over the past few years. It's not even all missions. It's whatever Natasha's fond of. Movie nights, sparring sessions, a job well done. And Bucky passes along some of the memories rattling around in his head he's afraid he'll forget if he doesn't give them to someone else to keep with him. Old candy stores, rides in cars, running from bullies, that one and only time they tried to smuggle a dog into Bucky's house.

Some are stories Steve told Bucky to fill in holes, remind him of his humanity, share a laugh about, take your pick. Others are ones that gradually filled up the notebooks Bucky's kept since he began getting his mind back. Some aren't even full scenes, just feelings or a snapshot in time, but it's still something.

It doesn't fix the fact that Steve isn't around to hear and partake in the memories even though he's physically in the room next door. It doesn't heal the emotional turmoil that's to come once acceptance and realization have started to settle in.

But for now, they take solace in the memories they can share under the low overhead lights, looking out over the dark forest.


End file.
